It's a different form of lock-in since it's just his creation. When he leaves, all of this will be very hard to maintain and the company will probably rebuild it all on aws.

I have been bringing this up but they say that it's too late to change direction now (they are afraid to upset the guy).

But I'm looking on the bright side. I get to learn a lot of stuff I otherwise I wouldnt if this was a single managed aws service. I'm bringing in terraform and instead of just putting a message queue there, I need to spin up entire architectures to run his ec2 instances with all the apps and everything required to make things work.

Takes months... So for me it's fun. I don't have to pay for it. But companies are crazy. :)